Search engines have an important role in Semantic Web

Thanks to the IKS project, I've spent some thought lately in how to make something practical from the concept of Semantic Web.

As always, the big issue is getting the semantic information out there. In a strongly typed CMS like Midgard, many semantics can be gathered from content structure directly, but to really get there we need users to add metadata. And as users are lazy, this will happen only if it provides some direct benefit: just look at how frequently people tag their photos on Facebook. Irritating or not, this happens because the tags are actually used to promote the pictures in the news feeds of tagged people.

Decoupled Content Management

Decoupled Content Management is a movement to bring clean separation of concerns into CMSs. With it, Content Management Systems can focus better on their core functionalities, and get the missing pieces through code-sharing and collaboration.

For me, the decoupled CMS story began in the OSCOM era of early 2000s, and culminated in the still-popular Decoupling Content Management article I wrote in 2011. The tools mentioned there — Create.js, VIE, and PHPCR — have since reached quite a nice level of adoption in mainstream CMSs.